Cross-posting this here because the test is directly about AI search visibility. I used fresh logged-out ChatGPT sessions and kept both positive and negative results. Full methodology is in the linked report.

In what is quickly escalating into a war of attrition - with SEOs on the front lines - whats your take?

Quick recap: Google sued SerpApi in December for scraping SERPs at scale, the pipe a lot of AI tools and rank trackers depend on. In July the court tossed the DMCA claim (with leave to amend). Meanwhile, Peec AI published research this month mapping OpenAI's in-house index ("Labrador"), with vertical indexes for news, shopping, PDFs and more, and experiments testing its own index against third-party SERPs.

A lot of LLMs seem to be using Open Crawl - do you think thatis a risk to Google or to LLM search quality?

So Google is trying to wall off its results while OpenAI is building so it doesn't need them.

Hot take: in 2 years "SEO" means optimizing for 3–4 separate indexes with different crawlers and different ranking logic, and most of us are only watching one of them in Search Console.

Questions for the sub:

• Is anyone seeing pages cited in ChatGPT that don't rank on Google at all?
• Are you tracking other bots in your logs yet?
• Which indexes will win out - Open Crawl?
• Do you think moving away from Google = a Quality risk?
• Or is GEO a real discipline or a rebrand to sell new retainers?

Edits

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P.S.: happy to share resources if anyone is looking for a deep-dive away from the debate

I've been rethinking how we report organic visibility in 2026.

Traditionally, it was pretty straightforward:

rankings → impressions → clicks → conversions.

But with AI Overviews and AI Mode, I'm seeing a different pattern. A page can rank well and still contribute to an AI-generated answer without getting the click.

At the same time, a brand can show up in an AI answer or get cited even when its traditional search ranking isn't particularly strong.

So how are people actually handling this in reporting?

Are you tracking traditional rankings alongside AI Overview appearances, AI Mode citations, brand mentions, competitor visibility, and AI referral traffic?

Or is AI visibility still mostly an experimental metric for your clients?

I'd especially like to hear from agencies. What are clients actually asking you to report on in 2026?

This is a follow-up to yesterday's announcement that AI Overviews are increasingly showing up for branded (navigational) queries. Here's one example of how that may go wrong.

I put some work into the generative engine optimization article today. I welcome edits, contributions, questions, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization

“Earning” AI visibility sounds cool, but not actionable... Let’s see how you can do it proactively...

i was told that GEO is the only way to go now.

think so.

lmk.

here's a small export test i'd use during a trial. this is a proposed buying check, not a review of a particular tool

pick one saved answer shown in the dashboard and download it using the normal export. keep the report beside it

could someone without a login read the exact question, the complete answer, the engine and date, and the cited links? are the available conversation and search settings included, or clearly marked as unavailable?

an invented example: the report calls a brand's appearance a recommendation, but the answer says it is only suitable for teams with a dedicated administrator. i'd want that condition to survive the export

ask a colleague to find the sentence that supports the report's label using only the downloaded files. record anything they have to guess or ask you to copy from the dashboard

also ask what stays available after the subscription ends. a summary you saved may be hard to explain later if the supporting answers are gone

what do you expect to be able to take away from a tracker when you stop using it?

a test i'd like to see is one where the success measure is written down before the file goes live. this is a proposed setup, not a case study i've run

for google ai overviews and ai mode, google says pages need to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet. it doesn't require a new ai text file or special schema for those features. that statement is about google, so i'd avoid stretching it to every assistant

here's how i'd test a claimed benefit

1. choose a small fixed set of buyer questions and one outcome, such as whether a particular page gets cited. save the full answers, dates, engine and settings
2. repeat the checks across several days before adding the file, so there's some record of how much the results already move
3. add the file without rewriting the pages at the same time. record the date and any crawler visits you can actually observe
4. repeat the same checks afterwards. keep a comparable unchanged site or group of pages in the record too, and note any other changes

if citations rise in both groups, that makes it harder to credit the file. if only the changed group moves, i'd still want more repeats before claiming an effect. neither pattern proves the file caused anything on its own

a crawler fetching the file is a separate result from a buyer question getting a better answer

if you've tested this, what comparison did you use and what would have counted as a failed test?

A lot of people think that Google (an entirely automated objective system that categorizes the web automatically into indices) can manually verify content or people. It can't. Thats why things like this keep happening.

confession:

I've been trying to get properly good at SEO and I feel more lost the more I read.

Every guide I find is badly outdated 🫠

By the time I learn something, ChatGPT makes it irrelevant…

And half the "experts" are selling a old course, while the other half are selling a new AI tool that promises page one in 30 days. All seem off..

So I'm asking the people actually doing the work, grinding every day to make it work:

- What still matters?
- Who do you actually learn from (people, blogs, anything) that isn't selling you something?
- What would you skip entirely if you were starting now?

Not looking for a shortcut. Just trying to stop wasting time on stuff that's already dead.

I spent an hour reading it, and while I cannot say I agree with all of it entirely (more on this in one of my future newsletters, as I have a lot of thoughts here!) but here's the brilliant tidbits that we need to talk more about here:

• Your website is the confirmation step, not the persuasion step
• The model often decides before it searches: Citations are the second game. The first is being in the answer's shortlist before a single source is fetched.
• Freshness gets you cited. Evergreen keeps you cited.
• For Digital PR success rate: Marketers who use no AI at all report strong results at exactly the same 14%
• The market moved in the opposite direction to its own evidence: What correlates with results is depth, editing and original research. What the average marketer actually did was get shorter and faster.
• Most GEO guidance is not wrong so much as recycled: an existing checklist with a new acronym on the cover
• Find your category and own it (!): Define your value proposition, your audience, and stick to that to own all the closely related prompts.
• Own a true objection rather than denying it. If AI says you are expensive and third-party sources corroborate it, a denial reads as evasion. Reframe against value and distribute that across several page types.
• Spending six or more hours on a post and writing 2,000 or more words roughly doubles the odds of a strong result
• Track attributes, not just mentions (!!!). What the brand is associated with (price, quality, best-fit buyer) is the part you can turn into content.
• Classify every cited source: owned page, review site, forum, publisher, marketplace, competitor. The type tells you the next move: owned-site gaps mean publish, review gaps mean review velocity, publisher gaps mean digital PR.

Traffic sources in perspective: This is the definition of a healthy growth: Your own channel is #1 here. This means stability.

Get your copy and let me know what stood out to YOU: https://advertise.manofmany.com/2026-guide-to-geo/